Cloud Computing
Micro-credential
September – December 2026
As software systems are becoming more and more complex and fully intertwined with our daily lives, the need to operate these systems in a reliable and typically always-on manner is becoming more and more apparent. Companies with great ideas can, over the course of a few months’ time, see global uptake of their software products, through proper use of cloud infrastructure in a pay-as-you-go model.
The goal of this course is to get to know how microservice-based applications can lead to more agile ways of developing software and how the ensuing embrace failure mantra of distributed systems can be used to increase the reliability of said applications.
The increased complexity of these multi-service applications can be countered by means of automation on numerous levels: introducing DevOps culture, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, testing automation, etc. Container technologies are identified as a prime candidate to deploy such microservices, while managing the complexity of running thousands of container instances is shown to be the work of a dedicated container orchestration platform.
The course will provide students both theoretical and hands-on extensive knowledge of state-of-the-art techniques to develop, operate and support modern cloud-native applications.
The target audience for this course is ICT-knowledgeable / ICT-curious people with a background in computer science through education or experience.
Participants are expected to:
- have programming skills in Python.
- have knowledge of computer architecture, computer networking fundamentals , web/service-oriented programming and operating system internals.
- have basic Linux (i.e. Bash) knowledge.
A personal laptop is required (which must be capable of running an x64 virtual machine). The participant must have administrative rights to the laptop as additional (free) software will need to be installed.
Micro-credentials are small courses of academic level that focus on specific competencies. They often consist of one or several subjects which are also taught in an university bachelor's or master's degree.
If you pass the micro-credential, you will receive a certificate as proof that you have completed the acquired competencies. So you also acquire real official credits who are recognized in your further career, also internationally. They can also lead to exemptions for other courses, also at other institutions and organizations.
You will receive a certificate of the micro-credential + credit certificate when you pass the corresponding exam (6 ECTS points).
Examination method:
- Exam: written examination with open and closed questions on theory, with closed-book.
- During semester: graded lab sessions (written reports), graded on participation and project.
- The final score is the average score of the two parts (50% on permanent evaluation, 50% on periodic exam).
- Lack of participation in permanent evaluation for no valid reason results in a zero for that part.
- In the case of group assignments, the students in a group get the same score by default. Only when there is a clear difference in contribution, the students will be given different scores.
- The student must pass (>=10/20) both parts to pass the whole course. If they fail for one part while still scoring >=10/20 on average, the final score becomes 9/20.
- Students who eschew one or more parts of the assessment can no longer obtain a pass mark for the course unit. Should the final mark be higher than 7/20, it will be reduced to the highest non-tolerable mark (i.e. 7/20).
Lecturer
Prof. Bruno Volckaert, Department of Information Technology, Ghent UniversityContents
- Cloud concepts: pay-per-use, cloud offerings (IaaS, CaaS, PaaS, SaaS, FaaS/serverless, MaaS), public / private / hybrid / multi-cloud choices, standards
- Microservice based application design: concept of applications as loosely coupled services, strengths and drawbacks, communication methods, patterns to increase resilience in highly distributed environments, etc.
- DevOps: from source code to operational support
- Virtualisation: overview of container technologies (OS-level virtualisation, microVMs, sandboxing, trusted computing, WebAssembly, etc.)
- Container orchestration: Kubernetes architecture and functionality
- Infrastructure-as-Code, automation / configuration management and provisioning tools
- Cloud Native Computing Foundation developments: service meshes, monitoring, policy agents, artefact registries, etc.
Final competences
- Understand and be able to use the terminology dealing with cloud-based distributed systems, OS-level virtualisation and orchestration.
- Knowledge of the drive and motivation behind microservice based applications
- Deep understanding of OS-level virtualisation types, along with strengths and weaknesses in terms of security and performance.
- Deep understanding of container orchestration functionality, including attaching workloads to persistent storage.
- The ability to set up a Cloud-based application on a large public cloud vendor, using Infrastructure-as-Code tooling.
- The ability to set up a CI/CD pipeline transforming versioned source code into artefacts which automatically get tested and deployed on a container orchestration platform.
Practical info
Fee
The participation fee is 393 euro.
Click here for more information about the billing process and the payment request.
A payment request is always addressed to the student.
If your company or employer wants to pay your tuition fee they can do so by using the reference mentioned on the payment request.
You can also make the payment yourself and ask for a proof of payment by sending an email to studiegeld@ugent.be.
This proof of payment can then be used as an expense report.
FYI: there is no VAT on the tuition fee. Therefore it is unnecessary to mention the name and VAT number of the company on the payment request.
SME e-wallet (KMO-portefeuille)
Ghent University accepts payments via the SME e-wallet.Go to www.vlaio.be/en/subsidies/sme-e-wallet and use authorization code DV.O103193.
Opleidingsverlof (VOV)
This training is recognized in the context of VOV (ODB-P00004). For each credit point you are entitled to 4 hours of VOV.This course (6 ECTS points) covers in total 24 hours of VOV (participation in the assignments and the exam is mandatory).
The registration certificate for VOV can be found at your personal page in OASIS (student administration platform).
You can download this yourself via OASIS. For administrative reasons, it's helpful to write the registration number ODB-P00004 on the certificate yourself.
Certification of exam participation is done automatically.
Info form
Fill out the form below and we’ll notify you as soon as registration opens.Info on time and location will be announced as soon as it becomes available.
The theory is recorded and shared on Panopto after each lesson. There is no live streaming.
The training is supported by the Ufora learning platform, which contains, among other things, the course material.
Laptop
A personal laptop is required (which must be capable of running an x64 virtual machine).
Organisation
Universiteit Gent
UGent Academie voor Ingenieurs
Technologiepark 60
9052 Zwijnaarde
Tel.: +32 9 264 55 82
ugain@UGent.be